Today has been mostly devoted to wrestling with the counterpoint. I’m finding it almost mind-bendingly hard at times – it’s almost like I’ve never done it before (fairly sure this is because the counterpoint course I did at uni was compressed into half a semester and I never quite managed to come to grips with what I was supposed to doing), but I’m finding as I’m working – very slowly – through the exercises, that I’m gradually internalising the rules and almost unconsciously applying them – no, I can’t use that note because the previous interval was a perfect interval and the bass line does this, therefore I have to move this bit by step. I’m finding as I’m playing through my work that I really can hear where it’s gone wrong and I’m picking up errors this way, which for me is a fantastic leap forward because my aural skills have always been a little on the rubbish side. I’m not done with the first species counterpoint exercises yet (the second one has an absolute cow of a cantus firmus – really hard to set) but I’m getting there. I’ll pick up where I’ve left off tomorrow. Right now it’s time to make an early dinner and get ready to go out and hear what Stephen Sondheim has to say for himself at the Southbank Centre…

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Honestly, it’s a miracle I ever passed anything at all at uni. I must have grasped more than I remember though, because working through all this harmony and counterpoint stuff, I feel like a right dunce. Today I started working through the first and second species counterpoint exercises – a bit of brain strain, but I just kept reminding myself to keep it simple, stick to the rules, check all my intervals, both harmonic and melodic and see what happened. And I think I did OK. It’s gradually coming together in my mind and becoming clearer with every exercise.

Also did a tiny bit of tweaking of the notes I put down yesterday. I’m not quite ready to start trying to mould them into real phrases, but it’s coming. Was good to have a play around with them anyway and make a couple of slight adjustments.

And of course there was some more reading. I finally pulled out the NMC Songbook CDs that my lovely mama gave me for my birthday and had a listen – there’s some fascinating songs in there, and I really like that they dropped in a few Morley galliards and whatnot – it helps to define things a bit, I think. Anyway, so I was listening to that and reading a chunk of the John Adams. I was especially interested in what he had to say about composing from speech melody patterns – and all the more so as it ties in with a discussion I had with the mama last Saturday about translating opera texts (she’s for it, I’m generally against it) and with an article I found in a book of essays by Janacek where he talks about the music of Jenufa losing its soul when the text was translated into German for a production in Vienna. And then I moved on to Rothko’s The Artist’s Reality and finally finished the introduction of that so now I’m on to the text proper at last. Guess I’ll tackle that tomorrow.

It also struck me today that I’ve totally neglected the website over the past few days. Really need to make myself get back to that and finish the wretched thing off. Grr me.

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Yup – I’ve got the very first notes of the quintet down on paper. Did have to get up right at the time Djelibeybi was leaving for work to do it though – with parents in the house I’m finding that once I show myself if everyone’s up, conversation starts and all compositional impulse wilts and dies in a matter a seconds. I suspect it’ll be easier once it’s underway and I don’t need to tinker about so much on the piano because I’ll just be able to keep the laptop in the bedroom and hide until the day’s quota of notes are safely tucked into their staves, but the very first step is always the hardest and most fragile, so yay!

I’ve been listening, finally, to some Morton Feldman today, thanks to @5357311. Conclusions:

1. I like.
2. It doesn’t work when people talk to you over it.
3. Feeling a possible need to use a lot of white space in the opening of the quintet.

Will continue the exploration tomorrow.

Having finished off the triads and seventh chords chapter of the theory book yesterday, today I was back into the first counterpoint chapter. Had a bit of brain-strain over it until I realised that (I think) I’m trying to over-analyse it. I need to remember that first and second species counterpoint aren’t really about which chord goes where (apart from tonic/dominant in the opening and closing) but more about melodic motion and resultant intervals. Once I sorted that out, the whole thing seemed a bit less fraught. Think I’m going to need to spend some quality time with the rules though to really get to grips with them. I need to play through the examples at the piano too, then I think the answer is just to leap in and have a bash at the exercises.

And I finally remembered to remove the two packets of lamb mince from the freezer and to walk the mile to Waitrose (and the mile back again – whee!) to buy four eggplants and some ricotta in order to make the moussaka I’d been thinking of when I bought the lamb on special a couple of months back. So now there’s space in the freezer. And there’s leftovers. There was a moment of panic when I discovered a wasp in the meat sauce I’d been simmering for about 15 minutes, but he was whole (if dead) so I just removed his carcass and carried on, simmering for rather longer than I would normally to hopefully kill off any potential wasp-related threat. It tasted good, so hopefully no harm done. None of us seem to have curled up and bust at any rate.

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Didn’t get as much done today as yesterday – slept in far too late, which was a bit of a whoops – but my parents and I do seem to have settled into a quietly productive sort of a routine – for the mornings anyway, which is working quite well – for me at least, and I hope for them too. It goes something like this: Once I’ve woken up, I sit up in bed and do my morning pages, then I read a bit more of John Adams’ autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, which I’m absolutely loving. Then I drag my sorry carcass out of bed and greet the lovely parents and have breakfast. I then take my coffee back into the bedroom and start work on some of my theory study while the mama inhabits the study and plays the piano for a little. The afternoon is a little more freeform, but at some point I take over the study and do some listening and some work in there.

Today’s theory study was seventh chords exercises. I found these relatively challenging – it’s the diminished intervals I have to fully get my head around, but the exercises are being very useful – not just building a specified seventh chord on a tonic, but also on the third, fifth and seventh as given notes, which I’m finding VERY helpful for working out the intervals because it’s not as simple as just altering the notes above – you need to work out sometimes whether your actual tonic needs to be raised or lowered. Really makes one think, which is exactly what I needed. Think I’ve got them sorted in my brain now. More or less at least

Did some more work on the site too. Unfortunately, it seems that of the web-fonts-supporting major browsers, only Firefox and Safari understand the text-rendering property, which means that the kerning on the fancy font I’m using in a couple of places is all off in Chrome. I’ve yet to test it on IE in its many flavours. Not sure how/if to hack this one. For Chrome it should be relatively simple – there aren’t too many seriously problematic letters, so one could just surround the tricky sections in <span>s and apply letter-spacing, hopefully, but I’m not sure how IE will react. Yes, I still have to do proper testing in IE. Have been avoiding it. Need to stop that.

Also nearing the end of the scarf I’m knitting for my chilly and very frail great-aunt in Sydney. She’s 94 now and apparently they keep her nursing-home at an Arctic temperature at all times of the year, so I’m knitting her a nice lightweight scarf to keep her warm. I spent a lovely quiet half-hour with my Da this evening in the study, listening to the Mendelssohn string quintets and Schubert’s Moments musicaux, him reading his book and me working on the scarf – happiness! I have lent him Art & Fear which he seems to be finding interesting, as I thought he might.

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I’ve been neglecting my harmony/counterpoint resuscitation programme for a while now – started out well, then life went insane, as it periodically seems to, and it all got a bit too hard. This coincided with the arrival of the Workbook to go with the Textbook and Anthology and CDs, which was rather frustrating but I just couldn’t get my head around counterpoint with all the stuff that was going on. Now that I’m not working, though, and the traipsing about the continent has paused for a little, I’ve been able to start thinking about it again. Yesterday I took a step backwards and started re-reading the chapter on triads and sevenths. I understood it first time round, but I wasn’t sure it had really stuck. Today I started doing the chapter’s exercises in the workbook and discovered that actually, a fair amount of it actually had. WIN! So I spent a largish chunk of the morning writing and analysing triads and I think I got at least most of them right (the only downside to doing all this solo is that there are no answers in the workbook, so if you think you got it right but you actually didn’t, there’s no-one to say otherwise because it doesn’t have the answers in it. I believe there’s a teacher’s edition of the workbook, but unless I run into serious issues, I think I’ll pass on that one – the whole exercise has already cost a small fortune!) – really quite satisfying. Tomorrow I hope to work through the seventh chord exercises so that next week I can move back on to species counterpoint. Yay!

I also picked up my flute for the first time in weeks. Yeah, that wasn’t so kind to the ego. But it had to be done. Hopefully tomorrow will be better… Humble apologies to Messrs Poulenc, Koehler, Sculthorpe and Enesco.

And finally, I got back to the website and did a pretty big chunk of work on it so it’s really looking like a proper site now – my photo’s in place on the bio page, the screensnap from the video on the credo page, there are pages for all the linked compositions, and all the ones that should have embedded audio files (still Flash, unfortunately, but at least it’ll get it online) or links to PDF downloads are now showing these up. I tidied the email form and the page of social networking contact links. I still need to finish testing in other browsers (IE6 is, of course, being particularly stubborn) but I think it’s nearing completion, which earns another Yay!

And I listened to both the Brahms and the Martinu/Schulhoff discs I bought yesterday. Both are lovely. I wasn’t really in the mood for Brahms but the Martinu was absolutely spot on and I think the Schulhoff will definitely repay further listenings.

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Yes, I know, *yawn!* it’s dull to read about but the reading itself is still very interesting. Today’s chapter (OK, half-chapter) was on web storage. Haven’t quite got up to Web SQL Databases yet, which will be huge fun, but the Web Storage API stuff (described by Lawson & Sharp as “cookies on steroids”) is more than enough for this project. I have knowledge. This is good

I’ve been trying to get motivated to do some more code, but it’s been a crazy, crazy day, rushing about, the landlord finally coming to take away the excess furniture, a spirited attempt on tackling the dust in this place and subsequent discovery that the vacuum cleaner that came with the flat is, in fact, the worst vacuum cleaner in the world. There is a high probability that I will go out in the next few days to buy vacuum cleaner bags and instead come back with a baby Dyson… Not a fiscally sensible way to begin 4 months off work, but I think it would make life immeasurably happier than weekly wrestling with a sucky vacuum that doesn’t actually suck. I’ll chalk it up to the “stress management” account if I do.

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It’s taking a while… partly because this week’s been a killer, and partly because my brain has been feeling a little sluggish and is a bit complicated, so I’ve been taking my time and making sure I understand rather than just skim. I think I’m getting it – it looks pretty groovy, but I’m also beginning to think that once I’m done with this chapter, I might skip over to the chapter on offline storage, and then put the reading on hold for a little – I’ve got a couple of iPod/iPad web app projects lurking that will require things like geolocation and webSQL but as I doubt I’ll need them for this project, and time is short (and busy), I think I should be focusing more on design and actual hands-on development. I’ll certainly keep reading the book, because it’s excellent and stuff I do need to know, but I think I’ve been through most of the bits I’ll need for the current project.

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um… yes. Well, the title says it all really. Except for the bit that I think I’m quite glad I won’t have any need to tackle canvas on this project – looks interesting, but a bit daunting. Going to read the whole chapter anyway, partly because it’s there, partly because I’m bound to need to know something about it sometime and there’s no time like the point where one is reading the rest of book anyway.

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Read the chapter on the new media tags today – very interesting, and great to see that even though they’re not fully supported there’s a range of fallback options available, both built in to HTML and via JavaScript. It sounds like there’s really a lot of scripting opportunities available (or will be available!) to go with both video and audio, which makes me think that my idea of a mobile piece using <audio> and the geolocation APIs, while possibly not entirely feasible right now, may be in the near future – can’t wait!

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Well it is when you’re buying a domain name for your Creative Pact project! This particular item has, I believe, sat on my to-do list for 4 years:

* Buy caitlinrowley.com

and just a minute ago I got to tick the ‘done’ checkbox. YAAAYYY! So now that domain is mine for the next 5 years and will shortly be ready for me to post fabulous HTML 5 content to.

Haven’t got that much else done really, though. I finished the chapter on HTML 5 forms (amazing!) at some crazy hour of the morning and haven’t read any more today because have been distracted by a multitude of other things today, but I’ll be back to it tomorrow, no doubt.

Oh, and late last night I managed to import the rest of the web stencils into OmniGraffle, and was therefore able to make my wireframes look much nicer and more professional

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